


mementos

by kivrh



Category: Naruto
Genre: (why isnt there a tag for trans gai why are you all sleeping on this), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Nohara Rin, Canonical Character Death, Dissociation, Fix-It, Hatake Kakashi-centric, Jinchuuriki Nohara Rin, Kid Fic, Kid Hatake Kakashi, Namikaze Minato Lives, Nohara Rin Lives, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Time Travel, Trans Female Character, Trans Hatake Kakashi, Trans Maito Gai, Trans Male Character, Trans Might Guy, Trans Nohara Rin, Uchiha Obito Lives, Uzumaki Kushina Lives, i guess?, ill update the tags along the way, rin deserves more than to die for male angst fuck you kishimoto., uhhhhhhhhh what the fuck else do i add
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-07 21:13:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17968151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kivrh/pseuds/kivrh
Summary: /məˈmenˌtōs//noun/objects kept as a reminder or souvenir of a person or event....Kakashi wakes up in the Hatake compound as it had been all those years ago, and he puts his face in his hands and sighs.(Another Kakashi-centric time travel fic)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> god i havent written anything this long in like. ever (story-wise at least)
> 
> i got inspired by the abundance of time travel kakashi-centric fics and felt like being self indulgent for once - ill have to edit in links to the fics when i re-find them again, because they were definitely some of the most emotionally charged and intricate pieces of writing ive read in ages.
> 
> also this is... completely unbeta'd so if you catch anything that doesnt make sense please let me know so i dont look like an actual dumpsterfire

Kakashi likes to think he’s a calm and rational person.

  
  
Years and years of repression and blood and nights of trembling in the corner of a bed have taught him that a logic-only path would be his own downfall, but it didn’t hurt to utilize both the mind  _ and _ heart.

  
  
So when he wipes the sleep from his eyes and finds he’s in the old Hatake compound in his child-sized bed, he checks himself over.

  
  
A sound check of his heart rate and breathing tells him he isn’t having a flashback or a panic attack.

  
  
A quick but quiet  _ kai _ tells him it isn’t genjutsu.

  
  
A pinch to his arm (maybe he pinched too hard) told him that he wasn’t dreaming.

 

He didn't really know how to find out if something was a hallucination or not, so he gave up on that.

  
  
Ah, shit. His hand dragged over his face in a gentle facepalm. He was too old for this.

  
  
Assess the situation. Are you safe? Who’s in the building? What’s your status?

  
  
Kakashi finds his limbs to be gangly and thin, short and a body that isn’t his (was it his?).  His back and shoulders don’t ache for the first time in ages, and his face feels clear of gross oils and the general coating of what he liked to believe was depression in physical form.

  
  
…His eyesight is completely normal.

  
  
Typically, this wouldn’t be a reason to panic, but when one has had a vision-enhancing eyeball of a dead friend’s implanted into their left eye-socket, you tend to notice when your eyesight has suddenly downgraded.

  
  
He’s been lying in bed too long, for this situation at least.

  
  
The sun is up, not fully. 

  
  
Rising from his bed (there are little paw-print patterns on the sheets that he never thought he’d see again), only pure muscle memory guided him through the household. Kakashi’s pretty sure he’d repressed most of his childhood before his father’s suicide, but then again, he’d been ridiculously young; it was natural not to remember everything about his childhood home (right?).

  
  
He recognized something was wrong the moment he woke up to an unfamiliar ceiling, but he wasn’t expecting this.

  
  
Kakashi’s forced to pull a stool and stand on his tiptoes to see his face, and it’s… baby-ish. Round.

  
  
Both of his eyes are there and they’re both his, a dark brown-black. The lines under his eyes, the shadowed imprints, they’ve completely vanished, no trace of years of sleep deprivation anywhere.

  
  
Catching himself before he starts spiraling downward, the boy stepped off the child’s stool and went to look around the house when a familiar voice sounded.

  
  
“Kashi? Are you awake? ”

  
  
Something in his chest twists violently.

  
  
It was like his head was dunked into water. Kakashi forced himself to swallow despite the lump in his throat, despite his widening eyes. He really, really wanted to go back to sleep.

  
  
“I was thirsty.” Oh god. His voice was ridiculously high - reasonably so for a kid under four, but it was jarring nonetheless.

  
  
His father, who was supposed to be dead, not that he was complaining, poked his head out from the doorway across the hall and gave a sleepy grin. There were no signs of weariness, no signs that he would drive his tanto into his stomach only months from now; only love.

  
  
That in itself made Kakashi want to tear up and start sobbing into his warm arms, but he suppressed the childish urge for both his own sake and his father’s.

  
  
Sakumo (his dad, his father, who’s alive and  _ happy _ ) comes over and pours him a glass of water, ruffling his hair, and Kakashi finds himself leaning into his hand. It really was him; his chakra was just as it was all those years ago.

  
  
Giving him a hug that he passes off as a sleepy, clingy child’s embrace, Kakashi sips from the glass that’s too big for just one hand, and he lets himself be tucked right back into bed.

  
  
His father gives him a smile he’s missed for so long, and he falls right back into a deep sleep fueled by a decade or two of exhaustion.   


 

* * *

 

It’s only when Kakashi wakes up again with a clearer mind that he recognizes something is truly, terribly wrong.

  
  
He’s in his child-body. He’s in the past? These are all things he can somewhat-kind of handle, he tells himself.

  
  
What’s wrong is he  _ knows _ something is missing from his memories. They’re all fuzzy, blurry, dissipating quickly, slipping through his fingers like water.

  
  
He grew up in the Hatake compound, graduated from the Academy at the mere age of five, his father committed suicide before he began personally training with Minato-sensei until the age of 9 when he joined Team 7 (he balks when he thinks of their ragtag group), became a chuunin at eleven, and a jounin at twelve.

  
Directly after he became a jounin, Obito died, crushed under a rock, except he wasn’t really dead. He made a promise and broke it, Rin ending up impaled on his arm like a kebab (she deserved better, she deserved so much fucking better).

 

He threw himself into ANBU work after Minato-sensei (oh god, Minato-sensei) became Yondaime and invited him into the position, earning himself the monikers Cold-Blooded Kakashi, Kakashi the Friend-Killer (he didn’t dispute the latter, couldn’t dispute it, only noted that it was convoluted as hell).

 

He… became a jounin leader? What was the Sandaime thinking?

 

Naruto, Sakura, Sasuke, senbon and chakra that lapped up the environment like flames and put images of red hair in his head, spinning tomoe, god he’d made so many  _ stupid _ mistakes, but at the same time it suddenly felt like these are memories he’s never actually experienced, just impersonal images floating through his head.

 

But that didn’t make any sense.

 

Maybe timeline-hopping into a state of adolescence affected one’s mental state more than fiction told you. Especially when the jump is from the brain of a traumatized thirty year old (Was he in his late twenties before the jump? Shit.) to the brain of an arguably not very traumatized child. Did trauma write itself back into the brain with dimension jumping? Was this more of a "he's-really-just-Young-Kakashi-but-Future-Kakashi's-memories-are-flooding-his-head-and-he's-getting-confused" situation? Was it not actually time travel?

  
  
Kakashi's brain starts unravelling like yarn and he decides that he isn't fit to try and compartmentalize right now. Or meditate. Or think. Or anything, really. Maybe he was never fit to do any of those things.

 

Maybe he was hallucinating.

 

It’s not like he was considered mentally stable outside of lying to pass psyche examinations. Images of Rin with a gorey hole in her chest flickered in the inky sea of his mind. 

 

(“I forgive you,” she whispered, life dripping from her chin. “But I’m not sure Obito will.”

 

The stench of rotting flesh filled his nose, permeating his mask, making him gag.

 

“Kakashi-sensei?” He looked through his student, wavering smile brighter than even his jumpsuit not managing to wash away the thick oil he was drowning in.)   
  
His eye burns like it's the molten core of a volcano and he wants it out.

  
Kakashi knew only a couple of things for sure right now, at least for his situation:   
  


  * His father was alive and happy, so he was currently five at the oldest. Sakumo had taken on that mission a little after his sixth birthday, and died (killed himself, he’d killed himself) only about half a year later. It was likely only a matter of weeks, maybe days, until the fated mission, if he was five and his father was still happy.
  * He had no on to rely on with this information just yet; his ninken were just puppies (he’d been able to summon them from a young age, but that didn’t mean they were fully fledged yet), and everyone else would recognize him for the head-case he was. 
  * He wasn’t training with Minato-sensei today, considering his father had been surprised he was awake. It was likely the young man was busy with his own missions; he was only fifteen when Kakashi was five, if he recalled correctly (was he seriously forgetting his sensei’s age? The man who stuck close to him even as blood soaked his hands?).



 

  
Kakashi had time to gather information, thank fuck. He couldn't imagine how disastrous it would be to meet his dead father, his dead sensei, and possibly his dead teammates who would be at the academy right now, all in the same day.

  
  
...How did he even act at this age? Little Kakashi was a brat, right? Proud and arrogant to a fault (but not as bad as Sasuke was, not yet. He got much, much worse after his father's death). 

  
  
Should he act differently? Would it be too obvious? He's had undercover missions in ANBU before, he's played many roles. Just not that of a five year old with the set personality of an asshole.

  
  
Waking up one day and having your child or student do a flip in personality would be worrying at the very least, he knew that much. But seeing them obviously fake it would be more alarming. Kakashi felt like banging his head on his end table; he was overthinking this, just go with it! He wasn't a stupid genin anymore.

  
  
Getting up was again a pleasant surprise; though he still felt somewhat sluggish, for the first time in ages it was as if he'd actually had a restful sleep. Not even his left shoulder ached in pain.

  
  
Blankets of sunlight warmed his face through the window. It was tempting to sit there by the window for the rest of however long this was going to last, wrapped up in his paw print blanket.

  
  
In the back of his head, Kakashi recognized that this might not all be real. Maybe his body was back in reality and this was some kind of fucked up coma situation, or just an  _ extremely _ vivid and morbid chakra exhaustion induced dream he couldn't yet wake up from due to said chakra exhaustion. Out like a light for a week. Or he was less sane than he’d originally examined himself to be, as he thought earlier.

  
  
A headache tore his thoughts in half when he realized, horrifyingly enough, he  _ wanted _ this to be real. Selfish as always. What happened to his future, to Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, if this was real? Did his team, the people he knew, cease to exist as they were?

  
  
Was this a do over? Another chance? It'd be hell looking at the faces of his dead comrades who he'd watched fall, but fuck it if he didn't jump at the idea of just seeing them again despite that. 

 

At the same time, it’d mean the people he’d grown to know and love, the people whose love he’d accepted into his life, were gone.

 

Forcefully, he lit those thoughts on fire and stuffed them in a box before throwing the box into a mental river.

  
  
Kakashi could  _ change _ things, if this past was permanent. The man spent too much time reminiscing the past for his own good, but...

  
  
He needed to know if Minato-sensei was alive. He needed to know if Rin and Obito were alive.

  
  
Making the bed for the first time for years (he was living with someone else again, after all), the boy hopped off and dressed up, wrapping his scarf around his neck. It was too big, and it was comfortable. He let himself indulge for a little bit and shrunk into his scarf.

  
  
It smelled of Pakkun and his dad.   
  


Scampering out of his room, he felt himself about to call Sakumo “Otou-san” until he remembered he’d only begun calling him that to stress his independence, that he wasn’t a kid anymore, before it warped into disdain, the original innocent purpose distorting into the wish to distance himself from the poor man.

 

Kakashi had to do better this time around. If he failed again, maybe he’d really just lose it.

 

If he remained the stone-faced child prodigy he grew up as, nothing would change.

 

“I’m going out, papa.”

 

Sakumo’s face froze before it melted into a bright smile.

 

“Take some money with you, ‘Kashi,” the man laughed, putting his hand in the boy's hair again. Kakashi didn’t move away. It was pleasant. “Come back before sundown, get something to eat if you stay out past lunch, okay?”

 

He nodded, giving Sakumo a shaky smile. Hopefully his smiles translated better to his father past the mask.

 

He left the Hatake compound with absolutely no plan whatsoever.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Going down the chain of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new chapter ^q^

In retrospect, maybe he should’ve thought things out before he came here.

 

Obito, young and bright and the embodiment of sunshine, gives him the biggest grin he’s ever seen.

 

Kakashi chokes and freezes up.

 

The boy is waving him over.

 

“Kakashi! Get over here! We’re gonna be playing kick the can again!”

 

Ah. This was after their first game of kick the can they’d played together, and before Obito began to rightfully show disdain towards him.

 

He began staggering over and Rin (RinRinRinRinRinRinRinRin) gives him a strange look (she’s alive, she’s alive). Kakashi looks all over for the hole in her chest, the blood, her glazed eyes, but she just gives him a smile and maybe he’s just going to fall over and lie in the dirt and let the earth reclaim his body.

 

His eyes are unfocusing on his own and he feels Obito dragging him over to the others (when did he run over to Kakashi?).

 

In his daze he notes that Asuma’s in the group, too. He’s alive, too.

 

Kakashi grips Obito’s hand a bit tighter, and if the boy notices, he doesn’t say anything.

 

The hand isn’t cold or limp and Kakashi’s not sure where that train of thought was going but what matters is that they’re alive.

 

Kids are chattering and goofing around, and suddenly he’s standing next to Rin, who’s taller than him (most of the kids here are taller than him). Obito’s off elsewhere.

 

“Rin,” he croaks, unable to stop himself. “You’re real, right?” He’s looking at the sky. Even if this wasn't real, Kakashi could handle it, he thinks.

 

“...Yeah.”

 

The response is automatic, completely unsurprised, and his head turns sharply to look at her in the face for real. Rin’s eyes are tired and her smile is weary.

 

She offers her hand to him and he takes it without a second thought. It’s warm. It’s shaking.

 

“Do you remember?” Kakashi can’t stop his voice from trembling just a little bit, from showing the tiniest bit of hope. He really does sound like a child.

 

“A bit. Sometimes I don’t remember anything at all, but there’s pieces that come back before I forget about them entirely again.” 

 

“I- what about Obito?” Static and fuzz filled his ears.

 

Rin’s shaking her head. “He’s been acting a bit strange, but he doesn’t remember anything. Maybe he’s trying to figure out what’s going on in his head. Maybe his memory’s blocked?”

 

Kakashi remembers his scarred face, marred with bitterness and hatred for the world.

 

“It’s better that way.”

 

It remains unspoken, but the look they share says it all. 

 

Obito deserves another chance to be a kid again, to live without the entire fuckfest he’d had to go through. Kakashi can’t imagine having to wake up as a kid again but with Obito’s load of trauma rather than his.

 

To say he’d gone through a lot was an understatement, but now, he can be a boy again. 

 

Kakashi looks at Obito, chattering nonstop to another kid. The kid seems content ignoring him but Obito, he’s grinning ear to ear as he talks. It’s enough sunshine to blind Kakashi.

 

Rin’s hand squeezes his own a bit tighter and the two of them resolve to protect Obito like Obito had wanted to protect them all those years ago.

 

Something’s bubbling up in his chest, and maybe it’s happiness that he doesn’t have to deal with this alone. Maybe it’s despair over the fact that Rin couldn’t be spared from remembering her first fate. She deserves to live happily, too. It feels like vines are tightening around his ribs.

 

The two of them join the rest of the kids in kick the can, and this time Obito wins, because Kakashi’s still getting used to his short limbs and doesn’t remember a damn thing about how to play.

 

* * *

 

“After you died, what do you remember after?”

 

Rin snorts, taking a bite out of the dango stick in her hand. The sun is low in the sky, turning it a fiery orange, and the few coins Kakashi has left jingles in his pocket.

 

“Both you and Obito turned into idiots, more so than before. Maybe if I was still there I could’ve done something.”

 

“It’s not your job to keep us mentally stable. It never was.”

 

She looks like she’s disagreeing in the back of her mind, but chose to say nothing more. Kakashi logs this away as something to fix alongside the rest of the entire world and it’s current crash towards another war.

 

“...I’m sorry.”

 

Kakashi feels incredulous.

 

“For what?!” His question is stated a lot louder than he planned, but seriously, what did Rin of all people have to apologize for? If anything, he should be groveling right now. Kakashi’s entire stick up his ass as a kid was the entire reason why the rift between Obito and him became existent.

 

“Jumping in front of you? Using you for my  _ suicide _ ?” The bitterness and anger in her voice is completely out of place.

 

“Rin, none of that was your fault. You were thinking about Konoha. You didn’t stuff Isobu into your body yourself.”

 

“I _traumatized_ you!” She’s shaking and Kakashi won’t have any of that.

 

“I was already traumatized, and so were you. You aren’t at fault for my issues and that’s that. We were both  _ kids _ -”

 

The conversation is cut short when Obito catches up with them, a little bit out of breath, and he starts rambling. Kakashi finds he can’t hear a damn thing, and everything sounds like he’s underwater.

 

He kind of hates this, he decides. An ugly feeling is gnarled in his stomach.

 

Rin shouldn’t have to remember any of that, not like Kakashi does. But she remembers, and his previous relief is washed away and all that’s left is rocks and glass shards on the shore of his mind. He’s  _ angry _ .

 

Anger won’t do anything to help his situation (their, it’s  _ their _ situation), so instead he just yanks down his scarf and mask and chews on his dango.

 

It takes a second to notice that Obito and Rin are staring at him.

 

“You- You pulled down your mask!” Obito’s jaw has comically dropped, and Rin looks just as surprised, but she just starts to laugh in response to Obito’s shock instead, covering her mouth with her hand.

 

She looks happy, like their conversation had been forgotten. Maybe she had really forgotten; Rin had said earlier there were issues with her memories. Kakashi exhales in relief before smirking at Obito with his mouth still full of dumpling. It tastes good, surprisingly, the sweetness not bothering him at all, and he wants more.

 

“What, did you think I wore it all the time, even when I ate?” He’s smiling now, and his face feels bare.

 

“You  _ do _ wear it all the time! Even when you eat at lunch!” Obito’s laughing, and the sound fills him with so much relief that it hurts.

 

Kakashi just takes another bite out of his dango (god, it’s good) and the three of them walk back to each others’ houses.

 

Rin is dropped off first, both of her moms thanking the two of them for walking her home, and Obito and Kakashi are left to walk their separate ways, homes on the opposite sides of the village.

 

“Have a good night, Obito.”

 

Obito pauses for a second, as if he hadn’t expected that. A small smile appears on his face, and he shifts his goggles using his right hand. His eyes look older and wiser than his years.

 

“...G’night, Bakakashi.”

**Author's Note:**

> if you want to talk to me about naruto shit my tumblr's @projdiva right now :pensive:


End file.
